Diamonds, Gold, and War by Martin Meredith The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa

Southern Africa was once regarded as a worthless jumble of British colonies, Boer republics, and African chiefdoms, a troublesome region of little interest to the outside world. But then prospectors chanced upon the world’s richest deposits of diamonds and gold, setting off a titanic struggle between the British and the Boers for control of the land. The result was the costliest, bloodiest, and most humiliating war that Britain had waged in nearly a century, and the devastation of the Boer republics. The New Yorker calls this magisterial account of those years “[an] astute history.… Meredith expertly shows how the exigencies of the diamond (and then gold) rush laid the foundation for apartheid.”

Martin Meredith has spent much of his life writing about Africa: first as a foreign correspondent for the "London Observer" and "Sunday Times," then as a research fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and now as an independent author and commentator. He is the author of "In the Name of Apartheid: South Africa's New Era," "The Past is Another Country," "The First Dance of Freedom," "Nelson Mandela," and "Coming to Terms: South Africa's Search for Truth,